Viewing page 75 of 102

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

BOOK REVIEW     STRICKLAND 
  Because racism is not a dynamic part of the student analysis, they are unequipped to cope with problems of black America. Their additional burden is a tendency to subordinate analysis to self-interest. This tendency is illustrated in an essay by Carl Wittman. Wittman writes in "Students and Economic Action" that "it is possible for students [white] to participate in the Negro Movement... [because] 1. the problems of the American Negro are not essentially racial, but are the problems of poverty focused on a racial minority; [and] 2. the problem of poverty is the result of an unhealthy economy."
  Wittman's analysis, though historically attractive to white radicals who march only to the tune of their own theories, is incorrect. The class deprivation of some black people is merely one characteristic or caste slavery. Ut was not an "unhealthy economy" which struck down middle-class Lemuel Penn. Nor would it have been an "unhealthy economy" which would have spurred a reign of terror for all Negroes, hand Charles Whitman ben black. "Nigger,"after all, it is not an economic epithet. 
  The failure of the students lies in their inability to define properly the relationship between America's black and white realities. They lack an objective analysis. Turning away from true historical relations, they fall back upon and unspoken anarchist belief that spirit will change institutions. Their perceptions of change are clouded, as for most of us, by the positions they hold in society and the "race" they belong to. 
  One the other hand the significance of the New Left is that it was the best of the white movements that set off, quixotically, to save black America. Its failure was a necessary precursor to the new movement for "black power." (What the movement for black power recognizes, which the New Left did not, is that the struggle of black people in this country is for social survival, not individual salvation. The demise of the New Left is the very nature of progress. For it is the death of one vision that makes possible the birth of another.)
  The worth of the New Left will be measured by what we learn from it. The thing it did not understand is that America is an empire. It is the principal bourgeoisie of the world. It is a society in which six per cent of the world's population controls sixty per cent of the world's resources. Its relation to the non-white world is imperialist-or would-be imperialist. Its relation to its European allies is supercilious and mercenary. Its relation to American blacks is paternalistic of hostile.
  The tragedy of the New Left finally is not that it has been dismissed. 
371